lands sucked up most of the west, although beyond them it began to get a little friendlier again; where we were the landscape was still mostly a mixture of patchy forest and meadow with the occasional sudden startling burst of hill and rockface. You wouldn't think it possible that something a couple hundred feet tall and vertical could jump at you from nowhere, but sometimes it did, and you'd have to swerve aside, like not walking into a wall, with it looming over you. But the moments when you had the best view and might have wanted to stand still a minute looking around and saying "gosh wow" I was mostly looking around for Lois and her Interesting Things; the farther we got in too the more wildlife, and I couldn't guarantee that everything was going to get out of Lois' way. And ours of course.
Most things will give humans a wide berth if they have the chance, and I assume they feel the same about dragons. And Lois made a lot of noise. She talked to herself — and to me — and she crashed and lolloped through everything. Going around was mostly not in her vocabulary. (I was reminded of how late she figured out "going around" in Grace's kitchen, when she was first experimenting with leaving the sling.) I did occasionally see her doing her sideways investigative bumping-into trick, but not very often. Mostly it was just plunge and thunder. As we got into more open territory I told myself that any self-respecting rattlesnake would have got out of the way long before she arrived — and I'm not sure a rattlesnake's fangs would get through even a twenty-three-month-old dragonlet's skin, which is already pretty horny. Fortunately I never had to find out. (Or whether skunk musk will stick ditto.) But there was so much birdsong (and bird warning-screech) sometimes I couldn't hear Lois burbling and crashing and then I really had to look round for her. I had reason to be tired by the time we stopped for the night: Nobody else was twisting themselves into pretzels keeping an eye on their hyperactive dragonlet.
By the seventh day I was carrying all my own gear again and I'd noticed, when Lois scrabbled around at night, that the bottoms of her feet had got rougher and grittier, like when you take your shoes off for the first time that year, when you're (probably) not going to get frostbite from going barefoot. First few days you wonder if it's worth it and then suddenly you're okay, except the noise your feet make on the kitchen lino is suddenly less of a slap and more of a scritch. I was used to sleeping with an overheated self-maintaining turbine going nowhere fast so this comparatively minor alteration for the worse didn't really wake me up . . . but then I was awake already.
The dreams about the dragons' cave were getting worse, or more vivid, again, out here deeper and deeper in the park, and about a week in the Headache seemed to be trying to change shape again, and it pissed me off in this fretty, oh-go-away useless way. The dragon dreams were enough — and the way they had too many moms in them, Lois' and mine. Can't stick reality, and this time imagination is no comfort either. Well, damn. So much for relaxation. It had been a nice idea. Although also in a strange, freaky, not-going-to-admit-it-even-to-myself way I was kind of glad to see the caves again, it was like going back to somewhere you used to know really well and haven't been in a long time. Oh, yeah, remember that tunnel, with the long pink streak in the rock overhead, it always used to catch my eye like it might turn out to be a sort of monster Cthulhu earthworm, and it still does . . . I even recognized several of the dragons, not just Lois' mom.
But last time I was seeing the caves this clearly and graphically I was spending up to twenty hours a day asleep, wrapped around a small sticky dragonlet. There wasn't enough of me to have two lives, you know? The sleeping and the waking. And I had a life (of sorts) when I was awake, now.
But I must have been sleeping pretty okay in spite of Lois' feet and the dreams and the Headache. Because I really enjoyed the last few days of the hike in a way I couldn't remember enjoying anything. The nearest I could think of was from when I was like ten and Snark and Mom were still alive. Pretty sad really. (But it made me think of one of Martha's and my favorite jokes: You need to get out more! It applied to almost anything about life at Smokehill. And then we'd laugh like we were going to break a rib. So that cheered me up again.) But it was like time out, in a way. We weren't there, wherever there was. We were leaving one there and going to another one. (We're farther in than we've ever been.) But at the moment we were suspended in between. Footloose and carefree, except for the thousand pounds of backpack and the baby dragon.
The other thing that messed me up sometimes was in the evenings when we called in to the Institute. We called in every day just like everyone who walks in our park has to. I always talked to Dad and since we couldn't talk about Lois over the air we had a nice fresh valid reason not to have anything to say to each other. He found different ways to make jokes about not talking about her though, which was brighter than I was. He'd say things like "Hope your pack isn't too heavy" or "Hope you aren't sleeping too close to the fire and waking up toasted." And then I'd laugh and then we'd agree that he and I were both fine and then I'd give him back to Billy for the grown-up debriefing.
No grown-up had still ever mentioned the Searles to me, or the Human Preservation Society. Sometimes it was hard to remember I didn't know anything. Occasionally Billy actually had the chutzpah to send me off to collect firewood while he was talking to Dad. Oh come on. Second time he did it I said, afterward, after I'd brought some more firewood and Billy was off the two-way, as blandly as I could, "What's going on?"
Billy never looked sheepish. He knew well enough what I meant. He gave me one of his almost-smiles and said, "Nothing you have to worry about." From Billy this isn't the put-down it would have been from almost anyone else. When Billy said it he meant, "You've got the dragon. It's up to us to do the rest of it." He'd been totally like this from the beginning, you know? Billy was big on focus. He'd understood a lot more a lot sooner than I had — from when we'd had that first awful bath at Northcamp and Lois hadn't wanted to be put down his shirt. But I still couldn't help wanting to know something.
Martha and I had figured out a code about some of it. I got to talk to her a couple of times on the hike in, and I'd say, "Anything good on TV?" And if she said, "No, just stupid science fiction," it was okay. But if she said, "There's a new cop show, and it's kind of scary," then it was not okay. The second time I got to talk to her was after Billy had sent me to pick up firewood the second night in a row while he talked to Dad, and when I asked her about TV she hesitated and said, "There's supposed to be a new cop show starting soon and it sounds pretty scary." Oh great. "Well, try not to lose any sleep over it," I said.
"I'll try," said Martha. "But I'll probably watch it anyway, you know?" I knew.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Westcamp was in a bit more of a mess than the permanent camps usually are. And I actually helped with some of the clean- and patch-up. It was weirdly exhilarating. It was because we were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't have to watch Lois every minute. And also because I was doing something that both was not about Lois and was about helping somebody else out for a change. Even my time at the Institute, the last couple of years, had been about Lois really — about pretending everything was normal, to try and keep her safe and secret — even if most of the work I did was also useful that had been almost beside the point.